Undeterred, I’m going to start on my own review. I’m going to try something a little different in blog terms. This post will be updated whenever I get a chance, both with new material and in terms of publication date so that each new version will appear at the top of the homepage, hopefully with the comments being carried with it. I’m putting in some headings, and starting off with an idea I mentioned recently, that of a tax on bank profits

* Reforming the treatment of negative gearing “Quarantine” business losses for individuals, at least with respect to housing investments, and allow them only to be used as an offset against capital gains. Revenue estimate: rising over time to $5 billion a year, or 0.3 per cent of national income/GDP.

“”Real economics is the study of how people transform nature to meet their needs,” said Charles Hall, professor of systems ecology at SUNY-ESF and organizer of both gatherings in Syracuse. “Neoclassical economics is inconsistent with the laws of thermodynamics.”

Like Hall, many biophysical economic thinkers are trained in ecology and evolutionary biology, fields that do well at breaking down the natural world into a few fundamental laws and rules, just like physicists do. Though not all proponents of the new energy-centric academic study have been formally trained in economics, scholars coming in from other fields, especially ecology, say their skills allow them to see the global economy in a way that mainstream economists ignore.”

Basically, the scientists (physicists, ecologists etc.) understand the empirical reality of our world (as well as humans have managed to do so to date and far better than any religious or idological system like standard economics). Standard economists don’t understand empirical reality at all. Standard economics is a formal system divorced from the empirical realities of real systems.

On taxes, why not tax the things easiest to tax? Tax consumption, real property, capital and wealth. I know a consumption tax is regressive but everything thing produced must be consumed (or else wasted). Therefore tax consumption and do it progressively as in;

With property, wealth and capital put high taxes on non-productive and speculative activity / wealth. Rapidly scale up the taxes on welath. For example, the property tax on a second house should be more than the tax on the first house, the tax on the third house more again and so on. Same with the second million, third million and so on.

‘Sustainable growth’ is a con that has been used to justify continuing unsustainable business-as-usual.

Of course, some will deny everything said so far. Humanity could arguably be called Homo denialensis not Homo sapiens, for we are very good at denial. Denial is common and has a long history (DDT, smoking, acid rain, CFCs, climate change etc.). As Naomi Oreskes of Harvard uni illustrates in Merchants of Doubt, denial often comes from an ideological basis. For example, the denying of climate science as it may lead to further regulation of ‘the market’ deemed sacred by neoliberals. Denial is also not just due to the denial industry, for ‘implicatory denial’ is rife in ‘we the people’. We are sadly very good at fooling ourselves and ignoring the implications of what we (en masse) do. However, the denial dam can be broken, and this is a requirement for sustainability.

I use Drobbox (a very useful product), and was amused to get the following email from them. It seems to me that the government might want to act on income going to tax havens rather urgently.

Hi there,

If you’re a user living outside of North America (U.S., Canada, Mexico), we’re updating our Terms of Service to better serve you and the growing number of Dropbox users around the world. These changes include the fact that we’ll be providing our services (including Dropbox, Dropbox for Business, Carousel, and Mailbox) to you via Dropbox Ireland starting on June 1, 2015. Please note that none of our services or features are changing as a result of this. You can read the updated terms at https://www.dropbox.com/terms.